Where did the idea of a “differentiated” afterlife come from? I’m not overly fond of the word “differentiated,” since it’s not one we normally use. But for the moment I can’t think of a better one for the phenomenon I’m thinking of.

An “undifferentiated” afterlife is one in which everyone has the same experience: there is no difference between one person and the next. It doesn’t matter if the person lived a good life, was kind to strangers, was meek, humble, and mild, did his or her best to help those in need, lived a faithful and loving life OR was a wicked, mean-spirited, arrogant, violent sinner who disrespected others and went out of his or her way to do them harm. The loving and meek, and the despicable and murderous: It doesn’t matter. Both kinds of people end up in the same place and have the same experience after death (in an undifferentiated afterlife).

As we have seen, that was the view of most of the Hebrew Bible. At death, everyone goes to Sheol. It doesn’t matter how much you loved God and your neighbor, it doesn’t matter if you were faithful, religious, and devout, or if you were a truly awful human being. Everyone went to Sheol. There was no reward for the righteous, no punishment for the sinner. One size fits all, for eternity. No differences. Undifferentiated.

A differentiated afterlife is one in which …

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Comments

As a Christian, I had always been taught from the OT that God (Yahweh) would always bless his people when they followed his laws. But then Jesus shows up and seemed to preach the opposite; that those who follow him would be persecuted – even to death at times.

The problem for me stemmed from the teaching that Jesus was God incarnate – the trinity. If this were true, then God obviously decided to turn the table on his people and send persecution on everyone who follows his – Jesus’ – teachings rather than blessings. The blessings for his followers would now be granted in the afterlife – as well as the punishment for those who reject his teachings.

I know now that the trinity was an invention of the early (Roman) church and that Christianity is nothing more than a contrivance of man to try and deal with the unknowable aspects of humanity and the world in general.

I still believe in a divine creator, but believe mostly as the Native Americans did about him.

So the “prophetic” view yields to the “apocalyptic” view. You have no clue how much time you have saved me. I could never have tracked down all of this stuff on my own without your help. Thanks still again.

Are there books in which contemporary atheists/agnostics have found the OT valuable in reconciling them to the finality of death? OT figures were not atheists and believed in a nebulous afterlife but non-belief in eternal happiness is very similar to the atheistic situation. Your discussions of Ecclesiastes are good examples but there must be more than that in something as large as the OT. I think contemporary atheists from Judaeo-Christian backgrounds might find “wisdom” from their own tradition to be especially helpful in ways that more purely “secular humanist” wisdom cannot be.

I should have asked this first: When you say “undifferentiated” versus “differentiated,” do you mean a uniform view (Sheol) that deviated and became a spectrum of punishments/rewards or one view that diverged into two?

Yes, I like variegated, but I’m not sure it is much of an improvement on differentiated (the latter seems to emphasize, more appropriately, a subject who *makes* the difference rather than a difference that just kinda happens)

So the literate elites of the day were so desperate to keep their national God propaganda thriving that in the face of its floundering or certain demise, they moved the goal posts, so to speak? And so now, instead of an “of this world” reward of prosperity/protection for obedience to Yahweh, so to speak, it now will have to wait for the “afterlife”? And so in this way they still can keep control over their people?

Interesting topic, looking forward to it. On a related topic, what did you think of Elaine Pagels’ book, The Origins of Satan? Not quite the same thing, believing in hell, and believing in a sort of Chief Devil. But the two are certainly linked in early Christianity.

I think paganism tended to promise rewards and punishments in this life, more than the next. You will get certain advantages from propitiating the right gods, and you must beware of their wrath if you don’t.

The idea of a differentiated afterlife was going to take hold, of course. With or without the Jews.

I wonder if differentiation was a result of people trying to make sense of evil and injustice in this world. In other words, because they could not reconcile a God would neither punish, nor reward, they had to find a reason to why such an evil person could live such a long and prosperous life. What is the solution? “You see, Timmy, when an evil person dies, he goes to a very bad place, forever.” In many ways, they rejected their current concept of God and created a new one.

Now, in current times, we are as a society coming to reject this concept, because even though it appears more progressive than the former, it is still quite a hideous doctrine. It is one thing to talk of punishment and rewards, but to apply never-ending/eternity to them is gross injustice. Infinite and endless punishment for finite crimes, no matter how heinous, is a miscarriage of justice.

We are a very tribal people. Because of the internet and modern technology, the entire world is becoming a single tribe. This is, essentially, human progression and is a good thing.

When the O.T. says God punishes Israel for violating his will, I wonder – how obedient do the people of Israel have to be? Do 51% of Israel’s people have to obey God? 99%? 100%? And how obedient do those who are generally obedient to God have to be? Perfect obedience all the time would presumably be humanly impossible. Hard to know what the O.T. means when it says “Israel” violated God’s will. I know there is no precise O.T. answer to this. It seems like when the O.T. says evil happens because “Israel” was disobedient to God, it is an attempt to make suffering compatible with God.

I know your expertise is not in philosophy, but I’m hoping you can indulge me still.

Are you familiar with Nietzsche’s Master/Slave Morality dynamic? The belief that what is condemned in Christianity (wealth, power, sexuality, safety, etc) have become demonized as a consequence of a misdirected form of jealousy? Much like Aesop’s Fable of “sour grapes,” Christian’s don’t (according to Nietzsche) hate the rich, powerful, famous, mighty etc, rather, they envy them and turn it into an issue of piety. The TRULY righteous suffer and abstain from such delights, for their reward is not in this world, but the world to come.

Although Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals is a rather crazy read in many aspects, it seems as though your account runs a complimentary parallel and I was wondering if you had any thoughts (no matter how brief) on my proposition.

It appears not, contrary to what we were always taught. The differentiated afterlife only long after the period of Persian dominance. And the Zoroastrian sources that suggest something like “resurrection” cannot be dated within many centuries of the period of our concern.

One problem is that Apocalyptic Zoroastrianism and Messianic Judaism appear to have developed in tandem rather than in series. So it seems less like the Resurrection eschatology of Zoroastrianism found its way into Judaism, and more like the Resurrection eschatology was an idea that found its way into both Zoroastrianism and Judaism around the same time. For its part, it seems the only idea that Judaism took from Zoroastrianism is the concept of Dualism, i.e. the cosmic war between Good and Evil. From that the Jews turned God into the representation of Good and Satan (or Azazel, or Mastema, or Belial, etc.) into the representation of Evil. That’s the Persian influence.

Bart, I’m interested in your opinion on how the ancient Sumerian and Babylonian view of the afterlife may have influenced the later Hebrew idea of Sheol. The two were very similar – the ancient Mesopotamian version was of an undifferentiated afterlife where everyone went. It was described as a “house of dust and darkness”, where the departed had to literally eat dust and drink bitter, brackish water. To my thinking, the similarities are too close to be coincidental, and were probably picked up during the Jewish exile in Babylon, along with the creation and flood stories that were later reinterpreted in the Hebrew Bible. Your thoughts?

My sense is that there were various understandings throughout the world of the day; Greeks also had an undifferentiated view, all the way back to Homer and almost certainly before. It’s not that the Israelites “got” their view from one source or another. It’s that a variety of cultures all had comparable views.

Hmm. Can’t resist saying situations like this – somewhat similar views developing, “independently,” in different cultures – suggest, to me, reincarnation. People coming up with “original” ideas based on subconscious memories, however fragmentary, of what they’d believed in previous incarnations in those other cultures.

I think similar religious beliefs can be explained far more parsimoniously through simple cultural contact, or even (perhaps) the need to deal with similar environmental or technical challenges, etc. Still, I wonder about what the extent of the Greek influence on the ancient Israelites could have been before Alexander(?) Cultural exchange through trade routes makes the most sense, I suppose, absent the military conquest of territory. If you go back far enough in time, you can find events that would have made a universally similar impression on people. Flood mythology is a prime example – cultures all over the globe experienced similar events at the end of the last ice age. Explaining the cultural similarities in mythology is easy in this case. Explaining the similarities in underworld/afterlife mythology is a bit more tenuous, I would argue. The neolithic transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural way of life goes a long way toward explaining the hero descent-ascent / dying-rising mythos, but the ostensible Greek influence on Near Eastern beliefs needs a bit of a firmer foundation, in my opinion.

I don’t think you need reincarnation or Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic fields to explain this one, though Carl Jung might have his own thoughts too….

The word that comes to the mind of a software engineer is a “sorted” afterlife, which I don’t like as it requires a sorting entity (but which may be specifically appropriate here for that very reason.)

It might be useful to have two other distinctions in addition to “differentiated”

A. Permanent vs. temporary. Other religions may see a judgment/ review of life prior to the next phase, whether staying in the afterlife world or reincarnation.
B. Learning vs. punishment. People may be sent back or have further experiences as part of learning to be better. Say, returning to earth can be viewed as punishment, or as a learning opportunity. The difference being “you have been bad” therefore”you will be punished forever, ” or “you will be given additional opportunities to learn the lessons you need to learn.”
And somehow current Christianity ended up with “differentiated” “permanent” and “punishment”- the latter two not seeming to fit in with God as depicted Psalm 103:8-13. Some things I’ve read say that the early Church had both strains existing in tension, the merciful and the mean. Thanks for addressing this fascinating topic!

Dr. Ehrman, I should point out that it’s not 100% accurate to say that the prophetic view in the Hebrew Bible is that EVERYONE goes to Sheol. In fact, the TaNaKh goes out of its way to highlight those specific individuals who prove the rule: Enoch and Elijah in particular. So it’s probably more accurate to say that 999,999 out of 1,000,000 people go to Sheol, while that one guy in a million got the golden ticket to heaven. What changed with the coming of the apocalyptic view was that God was going to finally open up the box office, so people should get in line now, because tickets to heaven are now available but they ARE limited.

There are extra-biblical precedents to this idea of unique humans in antiquity being granted immortality and life among the gods (heaven?), as you point out in your book How Jesus Became God. Utnapishtim (or Ziusudra in the Sumerian) flood stories, are obvious examples, but I’m unclear on whether this meant ordinary Mesopotamians of the day believed everyone else would go a sheol-like place, or whether they believed they were simply extinguished for good.

Metatron and Enoch. Having trouble getting my head around it. I’m on to Lawrence Schiffman and the dead sea scrolls. Disturbing parallels between ancient apocalypticism and ISIS — the ritual purity obsession, the willingness to kill others of the same faith who don’t meet those standards, belief in a final scripted battled. Oh my.

By the way, am looking forward to your views on variegated (ugh) /differentiated afterlives in the Hellenistic view (Hades vs Elysium) when you get to talking about the Hellenistic influences. While many Jews no doubt detested Antiochus Epiphanes Hellenization (from the concept of the Polis according to Ellis Rivkin to apparently everything else), apparently Greek thought permeated or confronted just about every aspect of Jewish life – even to include views on interpreting the oral law by the Pharisees. So, detested or not did it influence thinking on Heaven vs Sheol? I understand Elysium varied as to entry from just Demi-gods to later allow heroes – perhaps to encourage more heroes? Comparable perhaps to Heaven encouraging the faithful?

One problem that I see with the differentiated word is what about belief in one afterlife location but various experiences in that place? I’m thinking of the “happy hunting ground” type view where everyone goes there but have different experiences. Did any ANE cultures have this type of view?

Yes, different *kinds* of experiences (e.g., pleasure vs. pain) would e a differnetiated afterlife. But if you mean that some get steak and others chicken … I’m not sure ancient people thought about differences of experiences that were not different in kind.

I’m checking my understanding Dr. Ehrman .. so an afterlife needed to be constructed to explain why people who followed the laws of Moses were also tortured ? (essentially why bad things happen to good people? ). Am I understanding this correctly? thank you and trying to catch up.

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